Anniversaries.1

Tonight, I stopped by the 30th anniversary party for Mother Jones magazine, one of San Francisco's premier contributions to the world of magazine journalism. I started writing investigative articles for the magazine soon after it launched. I also worked there as an editor in the early '90s. Tonight, I saw many faces in the crowd from my past, and spoke to a few of them. I realized that I and my peers are becoming a distinct minority of those at parties such as this one. We are the grey-hairs in a youthful world -- the world of magazines.

Next year, Rolling Stone magazine will celebrate its 40th anniversary. I wrote and edited articles there from 1974-77. Like MoJo, it started here in San Francisco; in fact the two magazines have some shared history. When Jann Wenner took his music magazine east to New York in 1977, The MoJo staff inherited the old RS office at 625 Third Street.

They also got some leftover furniture, including the famous table around which we all used to gather for story meetings in the '70's Rolling Stone. People like Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Chet Flippo, Joe Klein, Tim Cahill, Tom Hayden, David Harris, Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, David Felton, Tim Ferris, Ben Fong-Torres, Howard Kohn, Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, Annie Leibovitz, Greil Marcus, Grover Lewis, Abe Peck, John Morthland, Paul Scanlon, Marianne Partridge, John Burks, Timothy White, Sarah Lazin, Charley Perry, Michael Rogers, Roger Black, Ed Ward, Charles Young, Christine Doudna, Harriet Fier, among many, many others, used to gather there, as did I.

Sadly, when they made one of their later office moves, MoJo had to cut the long table in two in order to get it into the new space.

It probably would have been smarter to offer the table to Jann, whose Wenner Media holdings now are worth approximately a billion dollars, for several reasons. First, he would probably have bought it for a nice sum. Second, it wouldn't have been cut in half.

That decision (the cutting) has never set well with me. I prefer my history preserved over that which has been drawn and quartered. Besides, the table already had plenty of gonzo knife marks courtesy of Hunter. Why use a saw? It's vaguely sacrilegious.

Nevertheless, congratulations to my old colleagues at MoJo for persevering. And, next year, congratulations to Jann, for never really growing old. Many people seem to hate Jann, but I don't. He's an American original, one of our true entrepreneurs. And he's still at it, even as he has passed the age of 60.

***

The Peace Corps is now 45 years old. All told, there have been 187,000 volunteers. (I was one of them, from 1969-71 in Afghanistan.) You don't hear much about the Peace Corps anymore; clearly it is not a priority of the Bush administration. But it continues to send people to poor countries all over the world for what inevitably prove to be life-changing experiences.

The gap between an average lifestyle in this country and that of most people in the underdeveloped economies is several orders of magnitude, which is to say vast. You have to be there, and live it, for an extended period, to begin to appreciate it. The gulf is so wide.

I can see the terrible misunderstanding that has developed between devout Moslems and the West in cultural terms. It was clear 37 years ago in the small town where I lived in Sunni Afghanistan that the main problem Afghans had with American culture was its apparent "godlessness."

I remember telling people that they shouldn't draw conclusions about Americans from watching Hollywood movies.

But, alas, I was wrong. That was before it became obvious that most people here live their lives as if they were in a movie! (Thanks, Neal Gabler, author of Life, the Movie.)

I was especially offended by the oft-stated assumption by Moslems that American women were more or less (cover your ears) whores. I felt that we as a society had no idea how people in radically different contexts were interpreting these movies. This is what helped trigger the virulent anti-Americanism among Islamicists: Hollywood. And the reason is obvious: They feared too many Afghans, Iranians, Saudis would be swayed by this powerful of all media and adopt the secular values (read: immorality) celebrated in American film.

Like many others, I was appalled by the oppression of women in conservative Islamic culture, although in that time and place I also was aware of how much respect Afghan women were accorded and how much practical power inside the compound walls and beyond they often exercised.

In the years since, our historic feminist overhaul of American society has changed the terms of just about everything between the sexes here. Now, with American women, you have to seriously watch your step, lest you somehow seem condescending, arrogant, overly aggressive, or whatever, just by acting like a red-blooded male.

It is all too exhausting much of the time. Not to diss my American female friends, because I feel every much as close to them as any of my male friends. But we truly have messed up our ability to relate to each other, I'm afraid.

***

Another old friend: Dinner tonight with one of the first people to urge me to get involved in the web. He is a major advocate of sustainable, green, organic lifestyles, and he practices what he preaches. He's an author, activist, philanthropist, father and husband, and a great colleague in any capacity.

He bought me dinner at Cafe Gratitude, which he believes is the future of all food consumption. I know he is probably right, and his idealism is always infectious, but I have to admit that I have a hearty lamb soup boiling on my stove here at midnight, because I am still hungry after our raw-food dinner.

Maybe it's because of my Scottish genes? I remain a committed omnivore, even as I am willing to experiment with more sustainable models. After all, if we are to survive as a species, the way we live in the U.S. circa 2007 needs some serious attitude adjustment.

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